Members of an Ethiopian opposition party who were jailed for 20 months in connection with a disputed election are lobbying the Bush administration and Congress to pressure Ethiopia to support a more open and democratic society.
Members of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) delegation also plan to travel to various U.S. cities in an effort to continue to organize Ethiopian-Americans and to thank them for providing financial and political support during their incarceration.
The CUD members were among a group of 38 who were pardoned in July after being imprisoned since November 2005. They had been arrested after months of unrest in Ethiopia that followed elections in May of that year.
A report written by the European Union called the election the “most competitive” Ethiopia had ever held, but said it was “marred by irregular practices, confusion and lack of transparency.” The report credited the government for allowing relatively unbiased campaign coverage in the weeks before the election but said support of Democratic institutions waned in the weeks following the disputed vote.
Government police reportedly arrested as many as 30,000 people in the weeks after the elections. Most were released soon after, but around 70 top CUD members were kept in jail, drawing condemnations from human rights groups and foreign governments.
Most were released in July and August after receiving pardons.
Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United States, Samuel Assefa, said the government had hoped the pardons would be the start of “a new chapter allowing us to reinvigorate the democratic process and enable healing to begin.” He said no other members of the CUD remain in jail.
While human rights groups condemned the government for the arrests, Samuel said the pardons were not issued earlier because the government did not want to impinge upon the independence of the judiciary.
“We have to be as fastidious as we can to support the rule of law and the Constitution,” he said.
The pardons came after eight months of negotiations from a group of elders. CUD members said they signed the letters seeking the pardons, which included apologies to the government, even though they believed they had not committed any crimes.
“For the sake of political stability and political dialogue we decided to accept the proposal from the elders,” said CUD member Gizachew Shiferaw, who was elected to a seat in parliament but refused to accept it unless the government agreed to a list of eight conditions CUD members said would promote democracy.
Samuel said CUD letters seeking pardons amounted to an admission of guilt. “Expressions of remorse are not compatible with allegations of trumped-up charges,” he said.
The members had been sentenced to life in prison just days before the pardons were granted.
Gizachew and two other CUD members who met with The Hill this week said they endured harsh conditions in prison as the legal process dragged on.
CUD President Hailu Shawel said he was put in a small, cold room after his arrest.
“I wasn’t allowed to see the sun for a month,” he said. “A man of my age is not going to thrive in that environment.”
Hailu, who is now 71, suffers from diabetes and back pain that requires he use a cane when he walks. Another cell was infested with bugs, he said.
“They would migrate from the cracks in the wall in the middle of the night and come down and give you the treatment,” he recalled.
Conditions improved, Hailu said, when after two months he was transferred to a jail. But he and other CUD members were locked up with criminals even though they believed they were political prisoners.
Samuel denied that the CUD members were jailed because of politics.
Hailu said the U.S. government should do more to ensure human rights are protected in Ethiopia. He believes the U.S. hasn’t because Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is seen as an ally in the war on terror.
“This is where the U.S. is casting a blind eye. They don’t want to see the truth.”
In the protests that followed the election, 193 civilians died and six police officers were killed. The imprisonments and the crackdown on the protests led to an effort in Congress to tie U.S. aid to Ethiopian promises to create an independent judiciary and free press and to support human rights.
The House Foreign Affairs Africa and Global Health subcommittee passed the Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act of 2007, authored by chairman Donald Payne (D-N.J.), last spring.
A scheduled markup in the full committee in June was delayed at the urging of the group of elders, who said the measure could complicate their efforts to negotiate the release of the prisoners.
Gizachew and fellow CUD leader Brook Kebede said using diplomatic back channels to improve Ethiopia’s democratic systems may be more expedient and effective than passing legislation. [Ato Gizachew told Ethiopian Review today that he and Ato Brook Kebede have been misquoted. Ato Gizachew said the CUDP’s official position is that H.R. 2003 is in line with the party’s manifesto and all members of the Executive Committee fully support it.] They told that they were misquoted] Hailu said he wanted to see Congress pass the bill.
“The ultimate desire is for all principles contained in the bill to be implemented,” Bruck said.
Samuel said the House bill would “drive a wedge between the two countries.”
“Considerations of this nature should be made soberly. This bill wouldn’t pass the sobriety test,” he said.
CUD members had met with the offices of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Reps. Payne and Chris Smith (R-N.J.), and had scheduled a meeting with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). They were also working to meet with State Department officials.
LONDON — Pomp, pagentry and the hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas accompanied Ethiopia’s celebration of its entry into the third millennium, seven years after the rest of the world but in line with the Coptic calendar of the Horn of Africa nation.
But with the exchange of fiery rhetoric threatening to upset a fragile peace with neighbor Eritrea, new broadsides in the internal conflict raging in the Ogaden region on the country’s border with Somalia, and dissatisfaction with progress toward improved social welfare, Ethiopia has entered the 21st century much the way it wrapped up the 20th: divided and poor.
In honor of the Sept. 11 and 12 celebrations, the capital, Addis Ababa, was lit up with fireworks that cast long shadows on the expensive civic projects funded by the increasingly unpopular government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
The elite — few and far between in the country of 70 million people that is ranked 170 of 179 on the U.N. Human Development Index — attended lavish celebrations at five-star hotels, including the Sheraton, considered one of Africa’s most luxurious.
Many among them are members of the Ethiopian diaspora, some of the more than 35,000 people who flew home from around the world, from Washington, D.C. to London.
For those diasporans who remained in their adopted cities, there were parties galore: London’s Trafalgar square hosted a concert attracting some 10,000 people, and Ethiopian restaurants around the United States advertised banquets, music and dance parties.
“People think of starving children and famine and poverty when they think of Ethiopia, when really we are a country where civilization took root and created sophisticated arts and music and education,” said one Addis native in London, an artist who refused to give her name, hunched over a plate of spicy chicken in sauce at a south London Ethiopian restaurant.
“This millennium party is a chance for us to change the way our country is perceived. Politics should not enter into the equation, it should be about partying and celebrating!”
‘There is Nothing’
For the average Ethiopian, however, unable to shell out the equivalent of two months’ salary for the extravagant parties, there seemed to be little on offer to preserve a festive mood.
Many of the planned festivities, including the annual racing of the Great Ethiopian Run, a “Taste of Ethiopia” celebration of national cuisine and a free concert hosted by the Rastafarian community, were all cancelled by the government amid “security concerns.”
Many residents of the capital spent the evening in church, following marathon prayers with meals of roasted goat and the spongy sourdough flatbread known as injera.
But even their festive meals were bare of the berberi spices essential to the traditional “wat” sauce that flavors many dishes. Price hikes put hot peppers out of reach for most of the population, leading many to decry the 21st century as the “pepperless millennium.”
So glum were residents of the capital that a wry joke was making the rounds, both of Addis Ababa and the international media: What’s Amharic for Millennium? The answer: minnum yellum, which literally translates to “there is nothing.”
Ogaden Humanitarian Crisis
Further east, in the Ogaden region on the border with Somalia, the atmosphere was anything but festive.
An untold number of refugees have flooded into makeshift camps, escaping rape, looting and murderous rampages perpetrated by Ethiopian troops and civilians on the mostly-Muslim population living in the triangle that juts into Somalia.
The Coptic Christian regime has launched a major crackdown on the mostly ethnic Somali and Muslim population of Ogaden, fueled, according to the Meles government, by its opposition to the independence-seeking rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).
For nearly two decades, the ONLF has fought both with force and through diplomatic efforts to end what it considers the region’s systematic marginalization by Addis Ababa.
In ramping up efforts to crack down on the ONLF, however, humanitarian organizations including Médecins Sans Frontières have warned that civilians are facing collective punishment and being deprived of humanitarian aid — a public pronouncement that has resulted in the organization’s ouster from the region.
Three of the worst-affected areas have been decreed off limits to both MSF and the International Committee of the Red Cross, leaving an estimated 400,000 people in a very precarious state, with limited access to food, clean water and medical care.
Next Page: ‘There is a humanitarian crisis’ . . .
“There is a humanitarian crisis,” said William Robertson, the MSF head of mission, from Nairobi on Sept. 4.
“Our teams have treated people who were forced to flee their homes and who are now battling for their survival with next-to-no assistance. They are living in fear, the targets of armed groups or in the crossfire.”
So preoccupying is the evolving humanitarian crisis in Ogaden that the United States, a staunch ally of the Meles government and major contributor of foreign aid, has sent a senior diplomat to help resolve the issue.
Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, called the situation in Ogaden a “humanitarian crisis” on a Sept. 8 visit to the region, putting Washington squarely at odds with a country it relies upon to bring a measure of stability to the restive Horn of Africa.
Border Tension With Eritrea
Washington is also looking warily at the resumption of combustible rhetorical exchanges between Ethiopia and perennial rival Eritrea, seven years after they signed an agreement to end two years of bloody war.
Noting recently that Ethiopian troops were just “meters” away from their Eritrean counterparts, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin breathed new life into the intractable stalemate, a tacit warning that Addis would continue to obstruct the implementation of a ruling that awarded the disputed town of Badme to Eritrea.
Despite the presence of U.N. troops in the border region these last six years, the two sides have continued their dispute over Badme, a dry and dusty town that has limited strategic value beyond its symbolic worth to Addis and Asmara.
“At this time there is little separation of troops from the two neighbors. . . . The armies of the two countries are only 70 or 80 meters apart,” Mesfin said during a Sept. 10 news conference.
Mesfin also chided a U.N. border commission’s work to reinforce the 2002 border decision ahead of its dissolution in November, criticism that was backed up on Tuesday by Meles himself, who reiterated Ethiopia’s resistance to giving Badme to Eritrea.
Analysts contend that Meles is maintaining his bluster on the border dispute in order to boost his sagging popularity and to obfuscate the ongoing domestic travails faced by his impoverished population. But there is real concern that the stalemate could edge into violence again, as neither Addis nor Asmara shows any signs of backing down.
More than one in 10 Ethiopians is “food vulnerable,” according to development agencies, which means they have no financial security that will allow them to regularly purchase what they need to feed their families.
“It is absolutely the case that Ethiopia faces some very serious political and security challenges, both at home domestically and in the Horn of Africa,” said Tom Porteous, the London director of Human Rights Watch, in an exclusive interview with World Politics Review. “Violating human rights law and international humanitarian law is not an effective way of dealing with those challenges, aside from being wrong and causing a lot of civilian suffering.”
____________ Lauren Gelfand is a freelance journalist and commentator with a special interest in African issues.
LONDON — Pomp, pagentry and the hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas accompanied Ethiopia’s celebration of its entry into the third millennium, seven years after the rest of the world but in line with the Coptic calendar of the Horn of Africa nation.
But with the exchange of fiery rhetoric threatening to upset a fragile peace with neighbor Eritrea, new broadsides in the internal conflict raging in the Ogaden region on the country’s border with Somalia, and dissatisfaction with progress toward improved social welfare, Ethiopia has entered the 21st century much the way it wrapped up the 20th: divided and poor.
In honor of the Sept. 11 and 12 celebrations, the capital, Addis Ababa, was lit up with fireworks that cast long shadows on the expensive civic projects funded by the increasingly unpopular government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
The elite — few and far between in the country of 70 million people that is ranked 170 of 179 on the U.N. Human Development Index — attended lavish celebrations at five-star hotels, including the Sheraton, considered one of Africa’s most luxurious.
Many among them are members of the Ethiopian diaspora, some of the more than 35,000 people who flew home from around the world, from Washington, D.C. to London.
For those diasporans who remained in their adopted cities, there were parties galore: London’s Trafalgar square hosted a concert attracting some 10,000 people, and Ethiopian restaurants around the United States advertised banquets, music and dance parties.
“People think of starving children and famine and poverty when they think of Ethiopia, when really we are a country where civilization took root and created sophisticated arts and music and education,” said one Addis native in London, an artist who refused to give her name, hunched over a plate of spicy chicken in sauce at a south London Ethiopian restaurant.
“This millennium party is a chance for us to change the way our country is perceived. Politics should not enter into the equation, it should be about partying and celebrating!”
‘There is Nothing’
For the average Ethiopian, however, unable to shell out the equivalent of two months’ salary for the extravagant parties, there seemed to be little on offer to preserve a festive mood.
Many of the planned festivities, including the annual racing of the Great Ethiopian Run, a “Taste of Ethiopia” celebration of national cuisine and a free concert hosted by the Rastafarian community, were all cancelled by the government amid “security concerns.”
Many residents of the capital spent the evening in church, following marathon prayers with meals of roasted goat and the spongy sourdough flatbread known as injera.
But even their festive meals were bare of the berberi spices essential to the traditional “wat” sauce that flavors many dishes. Price hikes put hot peppers out of reach for most of the population, leading many to decry the 21st century as the “pepperless millennium.”
So glum were residents of the capital that a wry joke was making the rounds, both of Addis Ababa and the international media: What’s Amharic for Millennium? The answer: minnum yellum, which literally translates to “there is nothing.”
Ogaden Humanitarian Crisis
Further east, in the Ogaden region on the border with Somalia, the atmosphere was anything but festive.
An untold number of refugees have flooded into makeshift camps, escaping rape, looting and murderous rampages perpetrated by Ethiopian troops and civilians on the mostly-Muslim population living in the triangle that juts into Somalia.
The Coptic Christian regime has launched a major crackdown on the mostly ethnic Somali and Muslim population of Ogaden, fueled, according to the Meles government, by its opposition to the independence-seeking rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).
For nearly two decades, the ONLF has fought both with force and through diplomatic efforts to end what it considers the region’s systematic marginalization by Addis Ababa.
In ramping up efforts to crack down on the ONLF, however, humanitarian organizations including Médecins Sans Frontières have warned that civilians are facing collective punishment and being deprived of humanitarian aid — a public pronouncement that has resulted in the organization’s ouster from the region.
Three of the worst-affected areas have been decreed off limits to both MSF and the International Committee of the Red Cross, leaving an estimated 400,000 people in a very precarious state, with limited access to food, clean water and medical care.
Next Page: ‘There is a humanitarian crisis’ . . .
“There is a humanitarian crisis,” said William Robertson, the MSF head of mission, from Nairobi on Sept. 4.
“Our teams have treated people who were forced to flee their homes and who are now battling for their survival with next-to-no assistance. They are living in fear, the targets of armed groups or in the crossfire.”
So preoccupying is the evolving humanitarian crisis in Ogaden that the United States, a staunch ally of the Meles government and major contributor of foreign aid, has sent a senior diplomat to help resolve the issue.
Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, called the situation in Ogaden a “humanitarian crisis” on a Sept. 8 visit to the region, putting Washington squarely at odds with a country it relies upon to bring a measure of stability to the restive Horn of Africa.
Border Tension With Eritrea
Washington is also looking warily at the resumption of combustible rhetorical exchanges between Ethiopia and perennial rival Eritrea, seven years after they signed an agreement to end two years of bloody war.
Noting recently that Ethiopian troops were just “meters” away from their Eritrean counterparts, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin breathed new life into the intractable stalemate, a tacit warning that Addis would continue to obstruct the implementation of a ruling that awarded the disputed town of Badme to Eritrea.
Despite the presence of U.N. troops in the border region these last six years, the two sides have continued their dispute over Badme, a dry and dusty town that has limited strategic value beyond its symbolic worth to Addis and Asmara.
“At this time there is little separation of troops from the two neighbors. . . . The armies of the two countries are only 70 or 80 meters apart,” Mesfin said during a Sept. 10 news conference.
Mesfin also chided a U.N. border commission’s work to reinforce the 2002 border decision ahead of its dissolution in November, criticism that was backed up on Tuesday by Meles himself, who reiterated Ethiopia’s resistance to giving Badme to Eritrea.
Analysts contend that Meles is maintaining his bluster on the border dispute in order to boost his sagging popularity and to obfuscate the ongoing domestic travails faced by his impoverished population. But there is real concern that the stalemate could edge into violence again, as neither Addis nor Asmara shows any signs of backing down.
More than one in 10 Ethiopians is “food vulnerable,” according to development agencies, which means they have no financial security that will allow them to regularly purchase what they need to feed their families.
“It is absolutely the case that Ethiopia faces some very serious political and security challenges, both at home domestically and in the Horn of Africa,” said Tom Porteous, the London director of Human Rights Watch, in an exclusive interview with World Politics Review. “Violating human rights law and international humanitarian law is not an effective way of dealing with those challenges, aside from being wrong and causing a lot of civilian suffering.”
____________ Lauren Gelfand is a freelance journalist and commentator with a special interest in African issues.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP): The United Nations said Wednesday that the situation in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region has “deteriorated rapidly,” and called for an independent investigation into the humanitarian issues there.
The U.N. sent a fact-finding mission to the Ogaden in the country’s volatile east from Aug. 30 to Sept. 6.
“The mission observed the recent fighting has led to a worsening humanitarian situation, in which the price of food has nearly doubled,” the U.N. said in a statement released late Wednesday in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
The mission also called for a substantial increase in emergency food aid to the impoverished region where rebels have been fighting for increased autonomy for more than a decade.
The U.N. mission was sent after months of fighting that followed a crackdown ordered by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The government says the rebels, who killed 74 members of a Chinese-run oil exploration team, are terrorists, funded by its archenemy Eritrea.
The rebels have accused the Ethiopian Woyanne government of genocide — a charge the government denies. In a statement on Sept. 13, the front said the government was punishing civilians for the rebel activities and that the fact-finding mission had not visited areas where war crimes were being committed.
“The Ethiopian regime’s policy in Ogaden continues to be a campaign of state-sponsored terror that largely avoids engagements with ONLF forces and instead focuses on collectively punishing our civilian population,” the statement said. “Victims of the regime’s war crimes include victims of rape, torture, gunshot wounds and those fleeing burnt villages,” it said.
The front called on the international community to stop “yet another preventable African genocide,” and urged the U.N. to investigate further in the region, saying the recent trip had been too tightly controlled by the government.
Bereket Simon, the special adviser to the prime minister dictator, dismissed the rebels’ claims after the statement was issued last week.
“They said it is good that the U.N. has sent the fact-finding mission. And now when the facts from the ground are found to be not supporting their claims, they are fighting the fact-finding mission,” he said.
The group is fighting for greater political rights for the region, which is ethnically Somali.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP): The United Nations said Wednesday that the situation in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region has “deteriorated rapidly,” and called for an independent investigation into the humanitarian issues there.
The U.N. sent a fact-finding mission to the Ogaden in the country’s volatile east from Aug. 30 to Sept. 6.
“The mission observed the recent fighting has led to a worsening humanitarian situation, in which the price of food has nearly doubled,” the U.N. said in a statement released late Wednesday in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
The mission also called for a substantial increase in emergency food aid to the impoverished region where rebels have been fighting for increased autonomy for more than a decade.
The U.N. mission was sent after months of fighting that followed a crackdown ordered by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The government says the rebels, who killed 74 members of a Chinese-run oil exploration team, are terrorists, funded by its archenemy Eritrea.
The rebels have accused the Ethiopian Woyanne government of genocide — a charge the government denies. In a statement on Sept. 13, the front said the government was punishing civilians for the rebel activities and that the fact-finding mission had not visited areas where war crimes were being committed.
“The Ethiopian regime’s policy in Ogaden continues to be a campaign of state-sponsored terror that largely avoids engagements with ONLF forces and instead focuses on collectively punishing our civilian population,” the statement said. “Victims of the regime’s war crimes include victims of rape, torture, gunshot wounds and those fleeing burnt villages,” it said.
The front called on the international community to stop “yet another preventable African genocide,” and urged the U.N. to investigate further in the region, saying the recent trip had been too tightly controlled by the government.
Bereket Simon, the special adviser to the prime minister dictator, dismissed the rebels’ claims after the statement was issued last week.
“They said it is good that the U.N. has sent the fact-finding mission. And now when the facts from the ground are found to be not supporting their claims, they are fighting the fact-finding mission,” he said.
The group is fighting for greater political rights for the region, which is ethnically Somali.
I had fallen in love. Ethiopia does that to people. It sneaks up on you with its lush, mountainous landscape, its delicious coffee, its beautiful people as warm and welcoming as any in the world. And before you know it, you’re sitting in a restaurant in New York or Nairobi, and all you want to do is speak Amharic, taste injera, and drink honey wine.
The trouble with love, though, is that sometimes it isn’t mutual.
In recent months, reports have begun to spill out of Ethiopia detailing human rights abuses and misuse of food aid in its eastern Ogaden region. Human Rights Watch issued a report urging Ethiopia to stop “abuses [that] violate the laws of war.”
The U.S. government considers Ethiopia Woyanne an important ally in the war on terror, since it shares borders with Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, the latter invaded by Ethiopia this past Christmas with Washington’s approval. Ethiopia has not been able to extricate itself from Somalia, and the military has been accused of possible war crimes there. Mogadishu even has a new nickname: “Baghdad on the Sea.”
In addition to sending nearly half a billion dollars in aid money to Ethiopia Woyanne every year, more than to any other sub-Saharan African country, the United States also supplies the Ethiopian the Woyanne fascist military with funds, arms, and special forces training from Army Rangers.
Yet with all the recent negative attention focused on Ethiopia, it is easy to forget that the country had been on the right track. In 2005, poverty was down, growth was up, the local press was flourishing, and the capital, Addis Ababa, was brimming with hope and excitement about upcoming elections.
When the results of those elections were made public, however, many felt that something was amiss. The opposition, enormously popular in the capital, came up suspiciously short. They called the elections fraudulent. Many election observers agreed. Protests took place throughout the country.
At this moment, with the international community watching, Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi and his ruling party had a chance to show the world that it was indeed a burgeoning democracy. Instead, it took several steps backward and made Western leaders like Tony Blair, who’d appointed Zenawi to his Commission for Africa, look foolish.
During post-election demonstrations, at least 30,000 40,000 people were arrested, and more than 100 were killed. Snipers were used on protesters. All the top opposition leaders were arrested, as was the mayor-elect of Addis Ababa.
I, too, was arrested. At the time I was working for a regional African newspaper, and I had been caught taking photos of federal police beating young boys. For 12 hours I sat on a dirt floor in an old customs house, and, because I am American, I was largely ignored. The detained Ethiopians were beaten and forced to crawl over sharp rocks and hop up and down on bloodied feet. The lucky ones were released after a few weeks. Others were taken to rural prisons and not heard from for months.
The crackdown was remarkably effective. Fledgling newspapers were shut down, and their editors jailed along with the opposition leaders. Average Ethiopians once again became hesitant to speak out in public about anything potentially sensitive. Government agents are everywhere, friends would whisper to me when I tried to initiate conversations about politics.
Initially, I scoffed at their reluctance to talk and told them they were being dramatic. I did not understand that after this short period of euphoria and political engagement, Ethiopia had quickly sunk back into an era of repression and suspicion, an atmosphere of fear exactly like the ones that had defined the country’s previous regimes, one socialist and one monarchic.
Just how naive I was in 2005 did not become clear, however, until this summer, when I began reporting on the region of Ethiopia known as the Ogaden.
The Ogaden is a hot and unforgiving landscape populated almost entirely by ethnically Somali pastoralists; it takes up a large swath of the Somali region of eastern Ethiopia. Depending on whom you ask, it has a population of 4 million or 7 million people.
Long ignored, the government has started to pay closer attention to the region in recent years, not only because of security concerns posed by rebel groups and Islamists from neighboring Somalia, but also because it has realized it has a valuable asset in the possible oil deposits there.
In April, an Ogadeni rebel group attacked a Chinese-run oil field and killed more than 70 Chinese and Ethiopian workers. After the attack, the Ethiopian military swooped in and vowed “to hunt down” the rebels. They began this effort by closing all roads into the region to commercial and humanitarian traffic, and then terrorizing the civilian population.
When three journalists from the New York Times traveled to the region to try to understand why the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a relatively unknown group, had lashed out so violently, they were detained by the Ethiopian military, threatened, had all their equipment confiscated, and were finally released without charge five days later.
Because I was contributing reporting to the Times, the Ethiopian Woyanne government began to pay attention to me as well. I would later discover that my phone had been tapped months earlier, and there were rumors that I was being followed. While I knew I was under some kind of surveillance, I also knew that I had to begin reporting in earnest on the Ogaden, and so I sought out people who had fled that region and had ended up in Addis Ababa.
In Addis, there are several neighborhoods populated by ethnic Somalis, and one was made up almost entirely of internally displaced people from the Ogaden. I started spending time there, meeting secretly in living rooms with cautious, veiled women and angry men, young and old.
They would tell me their stories and show me their scars. One elderly woman even removed her hijab, exposing her shoulder and back, to show me the grotesque, deep scar hidden there. Ten months earlier, she had been stabbed with a bayonet by an Ethiopian soldier. “He asked me to stand up, and I guess I did this too slowly for him,” she said, focusing her rheumy, blue-rimmed eyes on mine. “He meant to hit my face.”
Every person I interviewed had a similar story. Their villages had been burned. Their men and women had been jailed, tortured, and raped. Many had been killed. One student I spoke with said, “There are only two options for us: Join the rebels or flee.”
After a Times piece detailed these accusations, aid workers and officials within the government became more willing to speak about other things that were happening in the Ogaden, but none would comment on the record or meet publicly. They were afraid to jeopardize their operations in the country. The government had effectively cowed not only the civilian population, but also aid groups, the United Nations, and foreign embassies.
In addition to having my phone tapped, I was now sure I was being followed by plainclothes intelligence agents. On several occasions, after I exited a taxi, the driver would be interrogated by police.
One day, two men in civilian clothes identifying themselves as police officers showed up at my house and questioned my cook, a 15-year-old girl who’d just finished the eighth grade and knew nothing about my work. She was shaken by the experience, and I knew things had changed.
I began to consider leaving Ethiopia. My love for the country collided with my ever-increasing fear and disdain for those who were making my life, and the lives of those who knew me, difficult. For the first time in two years of living in this beautiful place, I was afraid to leave my home. The government’s goal was intimidation, and it was working.
Everyone around me told me to leave, including the U.S. ambassador, who offered to escort me to the airport. It was not an official expulsion, but there was a real chance that I would be arrested and charged under local laws if I stayed. The next day, I reluctantly bought a ticket and packed my bags.
Early on a Saturday morning, I hailed a taxi to take me to the American Embassy. As we pulled away from my house, I noticed my landlord looking out from his door. He had seen me put luggage into the taxi, and I knew he would immediately call the police with this information.
Earlier that week, I had learned that the man I had lived not 200 yards from for two years, the man I paid my rent to and chatted amiably about America with, was an unofficial government spy. In 2005, he had identified and turned in dozens of neighborhood people he suspected of supporting the opposition party. He even appeared on the state-run TV channel urging the ruling party and the police to more effectively punish the city’s young people.
I urged the taxi driver to hurry. At the embassy, I was greeted by the ambassador, who shook my hand and tossed my suitcase into the trunk of his waiting SUV. “I wonder if there’ll be any Ethiopian intelligence guys waiting for you at the airport,” he said, chuckling.
There were not. Only glassy-eyed airport employees and passengers going about the business of waiting. I boarded the plane, and without any fanfare except my own nervous breathing, flew away from Ethiopia—the country I loved that, in the end, didn’t love me back.
______ Will Connors is a freelance writer unsure of where he’s headed next. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and BBC.com.
